Unnofficial Anthems 7 – Arse is the size of a small country

Weirdly Divine Comedy’s National Express re-entered my consciousness twice this week, once via Maconie on 6Music then a day or two later it came round randomly on my iPod (I have random playlists but that hadn’t popped up before and hadn’t ‘shuffled’ for a long time). Now we are approaching the Opening Ceremony, my personal choice for an Olympics anthem writer would be Neil Hannon…I hope he’s observing what’s going on over the Jubilee and Olympics and writing about it anyway. Something about this song and the naffness of National Express seemed to express something that tends to be missing from anthems – they gloss over class and gloss over the bad bits. Neil has never done that…

Another choice from the Divine Comedy canon would be the Yann Tiersen collab – Le Jours Tristes (The Sad Days) which was originally an instrumental on the Amelie soundtrack:

It’s hard but you know it’s worth the fight
‘Cause you know you’ve got the truth on your side
When the accusations fly, hold tight
Don’t be afraid of what they’ll say
Who cares what cowards think, anyway
They will understand one day, one day

What Time Is It?

Radio Clash was probably the longest continuously running music podcast (it ran 10 years from Nov 2004 to Nov 2014) and one of the first music podcasts in the UK.
Originally only about mashup culture, but since extended to a live music station and blog which are very much still alive, talking about politics, sex, drugs and rock and roll. All posts are probably at least a little bit NSFW, because if it's that safe, then why post it?